Consider the Lobster (42 page)

⁶⁰
(Or rather the arguments require us openly to acknowledge and talk about elitism, whereas a traditional dogmatic SNOOT’s pedagogy is merely elitism in action.)
(back to text)

⁶¹
(I’m not a total idiot.)
(back to text)

⁶²
ESPECIALLY GOOD EPIGRAPHS FOR THIS SECTION
“Passive voice verbs, in particular, may deny female agency.”—
DR. MARILYN SCHWARTZ AND THE TASK FORCE ON BIAS-FREE LANGUAGE OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESSES
“He raised his voice suddenly, and shouted for dinner. Servants shouted back that it was ready. They meant that they wished it was ready, and were so understood, for nobody moved.”—
E. M. FORSTER
(back to text)

⁶³
(A pithier way to put this is that
politeness
is not the same as
fairness
.)
(back to text)

⁶⁴
E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists’ complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization.
(back to text)

⁶⁵
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage
includes a miniessay on vogue words, but it’s a disappointing one in which Garner does little more than list VWs that bug him and say that “vogue words have such a grip on the popular mind that they come to be used in contexts in which they serve little purpose.” This is one of the rare places in
ADMAU
where Garner is simply wrong. The real problem is that every sentence blends and balances at least two different communicative functions — one the transmission of raw info, the other the transmission of certain stuff about the speaker — and Vogue Usage throws this balance off. Garner’s “serve little purpose” is exactly incorrect: vogue words serve
too much
the purpose of presenting the speaker in a certain light (even if this is merely as with-it or hip), and people’s odd little subliminal BS-antennae pick this imbalance up, and that’s why even nonSNOOTs often find Vogue Usages irritating and creepy. It’s the same phenomenon as when somebody goes out of her way to be incredibly solicitous and complimentary and nice to you and after a while you begin to find her solicitude creepy: you are sensing that a disproportionately large part of this person’s agenda consists in trying to present herself as Nice.
(back to text)

⁶⁶
FYI, this snippet, which appears in
ADMAU’
s miniessay on obscurity, is quoted from a 1997
Sacramento Bee
article entitled “No Contest: English Professors Are Worst Writers on Campus.”
(back to text)

⁶⁷
This was in his 1946 “Politics and the English Language,” an essay that despite its date (and the basic redundancy of its title) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell’s famous AE translation of the gorgeous “I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift” part of Ecclesiastes as “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account” should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world.
(back to text)

⁶⁸
If you still think assertions like that are just SNOOT hyperbole, see also e.g. Dr. Fredric Jameson, author of
The Geopolitical Aesthetic
and
The Prison-House of Language,
whom
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
calls “one of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary critics writing in English.” Specifically, have a look at the first sentence of Dr. Jameson’s 1992
Signatures of the Visible

—The visual is
essentially
pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the thankless effort to discipline the viewer).

— in which not only is each of its three main independent clauses totally obscure and full of predicates without evident subjects and pronouns without clear antecedents, but whatever connection between those clauses justifies stringing them together into one long semicolonic sentence is anyone’s guess at all.

Please be advised (a) that the above sentence won 1997’s First Prize in the World’s Worst Writing Contest held annually at Canterbury University in New Zealand, a competition in which American academics regularly sweep the field, and (b) that F. Jameson was and is an extremely powerful and influential and oft-cited figure in US literary scholarship, which means (c) that if you have kids in college, there’s a good chance that they are being taught how to write by high-paid adults for whom the above sentence is a model of erudite English prose.
(back to text)

⁶⁹
Even in Freshman Comp, bad student essays are far, far more often the products of fear than of laziness or incompetence. In fact, it often takes so long to identify and help with students’ fear that the Freshman Comp teacher never gets to find out whether they might have other problems, too.
(back to text)

⁷⁰
(Notice the idiom’s syntax — it’s never “expresses his beliefs” or “expresses his ideas.”)
(back to text)

⁷¹
(Please just don’t even say it.)
(back to text)

⁷²
(The student professed to have been especially traumatized by the climactic “I am going to make you,” which was indeed a rhetorical boner.)
(back to text)

⁷³
FYI, the dept. chair and dean did not, at the Complaint hearing, share her reaction… though it would be disingenuous not to tell you that they happened also to be PWMs, which fact was also remarked on by the complainant, such that the whole proceeding got pretty darn tense indeed, before it was over.
(back to text)

⁷⁴
To be honest, I noticed this omission only because midway through working on this article I happened to use the word
trough
in front of the same SNOOT friend who compares public English to violin-hammering, and he fell sideways out of his chair, and it emerged that I have somehow all my life misheard
trough
as ending with a
th
instead of an
f
and thus have publicly mispronounced it God only knows how many scores of times, and I all but burned rubber getting home to see whether perhaps the error was so common and human and understandable that
ADMAU
had a good-natured entry on it — but no such luck, which in fairness I don’t suppose I can really blame Garner for.
(back to text)

⁷⁵
(on
zwieback
vs.
zweiback
)
(back to text)

⁷⁶
It’s this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics — how does one vote for No More Voting?
(back to text)

⁷⁷
(meaning
literally
Democratic — it Wants Your Vote)
(back to text)

⁷⁸
The last two words of this sentence, of course, are what the Usage Wars are all about — whose “language” and whose “well”? The most remarkable thing about the sentence is that coming from Garner it doesn’t sound naive or obnoxious but just… reasonable.
(back to text)

⁷⁹
(Did you think I was kidding?)
(back to text)

⁸⁰
Cunning — what is in effect Garner’s blowing his own archival horn is cast as humble gratitude for the resources made available by modern technology. Plus notice also Garner’s implication here that he’s once again absorbed the sane parts of Descriptivism’s cast-a-wide-net method: “Thus, the prescriptive approach here is leavened by a thorough canvassing of actual usage in modern edited prose.”
(back to text)

⁸¹
(Here, this reviewer’s indwelling and ever-vigilant SNOOT can’t help but question Garner’s deployment of a comma before the conjunction in this sentence, since what follows the conjunction is neither an independent clause nor any sort of plausible complement for “strive to.” But respectful disagreement between people of goodwill is of course Democratically natural and healthy and, when you come right down to it, kind of fun.)
(back to text)

¹⁴⁴
* Plus: Selected other responses from various times during the day’s flag-hunt when circumstances permitted the question to be asked without one seeming like a smartass or loon:

“To show we’re Americans and we’re not going to bow down to nobody”;

“It’s a classic pseudo-archetype, a reflexive semion designed to preempt and negate the critical function” (grad student);

“For pride.”

“What they do is symbolize unity and that we’re all together behind the victims in this war and they’ve fucked with the wrong people this time, amigo.”
(back to text)

¹⁴⁵
*
Pace
some people’s impression, the native accent around here isn’t southern so much as just rural. The town’s corporate transplants, on the other hand, have no accent at all — in Mrs. Bracero’s phrase, State Farm people “sound like the folks on TV.”
(back to text)

¹⁴⁶
† People here are deeply, deeply into lawn-care; my own neighbors mow about as often as they shave.
(back to text)

¹⁴⁷
* Mrs. Thompson’s living room is prototypical working-class Bloomington, too: double-pane windows, white Sears curtains w/ valence, catalogue clock with a background of mallards, woodgrain magazine rack with
CSM
and
Reader’s Digest,
inset bookshelves used to display little collectible figurines and framed photos of relatives and their families. There are two knit samplers w/ the Desiderata and Prayer of St. Francis, antimacassars on every good chair, and wall-to-wall carpet so thick that you can’t see your feet (people take their shoes off at the door — it’s basic common courtesy).
(back to text)

¹⁴⁸
* AP reporter Michael Mewshaw’s
Short Circuit
(Atheneum, 1983) is just one example of national-press stuff about drugs on the tour.
(back to text)

¹⁴⁹
* Or listen again to her report of how winning her first US Open felt: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.” This line haunts me; it’s like the whole letdown of the book boiled down into one dead bite.
(back to text)

¹⁵⁰
* Here I should point out that this
RS
editor, whose name was Mr. Tonelli, delivered the length-and-space verdict with sympathy and good humor, and that he was pretty much a mensch through the whole radically ablative editorial process that followed, which process was itself unusually rushed and stressful because right in the middle of it (the process) came Super Tuesday’s bloodbath, and McCain really did drop out — Mr. Tonelli was actually watching McCain’s announcement on his office TV while we were doing the first round of cuts on the telephone — and apparently
Rolling Stone’
s top brass’s fear of looking stupid came roaring back into their limbic system and they told poor Mr. Tonelli that the article had to be all of a sudden crammed into the very next issue of
RS,
even though that issue was scheduled to “close” and go to the printer in less than 48 hours, which, if you know anything about magazines’ normally interminable editing and fact-checking and copyediting and typesetting and proofreading and retype-setting and layout and printing processes, you’ll understand why Mr. Tonelli’s good humor through the whole thing was noteworthy.
(back to text)

¹⁵¹
* In particular I never got to talk to Mr. Mike Murphy, who if you read the document you’ll understand why he’d be the one McCain staffer you’d just about give a nut to get three or four drinks into and then start probing. Despite sustained pestering and sleeve-tugging and pride-swallowing appeals to the Head Press Liaison for even just ten lousy minutes, though — and even after
RS’
s Mr. Tonelli himself called McCain2000 HQ in Virginia to bitch and wheedle — Mike Murphy avoided this reporter to the point of actually starting to duck around corners whenever he saw me coming. The unending pursuit of this one interview (what eventually in my notebook got called
“MurphyQuest 2000”
) actually turned into one of the great personal subdramas of the week, and there’s a whole very lengthy and sordid story to tell here, including some embarrassing but probably in retrospect kind of funny attempts to corner the poor man in all sorts of awkward personal venues where I figured he’d have a hard time escaping… nevertheless the crux here is that Murphy’s total inaccessibility to yrs. truly was not, I finally realized, anything personal, but rather a simple function of my being from
Rolling Stone,
a (let’s face it) politically featherweight organ whose readership was clearly not part of any GOP demographic that was going to help Mike Murphy’s candidate in SC or MI or any of the other upcoming sink-or-swim primaries. In fact, because the magazine was a biweekly with a long lead time — the Lebanese-Australian lady from the
Boston Globe
(see document) pointed all this out to yrs. truly after we’d just watched Murphy more or less fake an epileptic seizure to get out of riding in an elevator with me — even a droolingly pro-McCain
Rolling Stone
article wouldn’t actually appear until after 7 March’s Super Tuesday, by which time, she predicted (correctly), the nomination battle would effectively be over.
(back to text)